1. Field of the Invention
This invention is related to a technique and method for handling the amount of information retrieved from a search request sent to an Internet search engine, particularly wherein the user at the client computer side may dynamically change the depth of information from a search result abstract.
2. Description of Related Art
The advent of the Internet as an everyday useful tool in gathering information as gained considerable momentum in the past decade. People using the Internet today can be as diverse as an elementary school student searching an on-line encyclopedia to complete a homework assignment to a scientist looking for the latest articles in their field of research. There is so much information available on the Internet but there is still very little organization to the Internet that sometimes it may seem impossible to find the right information or documents that you want without having to wade through a seemingly endless list of search results.
One method of structuring information on the Internet is an index. Indexes allow the user to browse through information which has been organized according to categories such as sports, arts, business, etc., and their corresponding subcategories. One popular index on the Internet today is Yahoo!®. By selecting a category and/or a subcategory, the user finally gets to a list of documents and their uniform resource locators for further browsing.
Another popular way of finding information is to use search engines which are massive databases that cover huge portions of the Internet. Unlike an index, a search engine does not return the data in categories but as a list of hits which contain, in decreasing order, the user's key word match. Typically, an Internet search engine returns a result set for a search query consisting of a URL (uniform resource locator) and a text based abstract of the original resource. Oftentimes, the user is able to control the length of the abstract. For example, HotBot® search engine at URL http://www.hotbot.com provides the user with a choice of displaying the search results as a list of URLs, the URL with a brief abstract, or a comprehensive abstract.
However, since the abstract has been compiled at the server site, once the abstract has been retrieved, there is no way of changing the abstract detail level without issuing a new query specifying a different level of detail in the abstract. Moreover, today's search engines do not provide the capability which allows a user to “zoom” in or out of an abstract thereby allowing the user to review search results more quickly and efficiently.
Bearing in mind the problems and deficiencies of the prior art, it is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a method of reviewing search results more quickly and efficiently for the Internet user searching for information.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a method of dynamically controlling the level of information from a list of search result abstracts at the client computer.
A further object of the invention is to provide a method of “zooming” in and out of the abstract wherein the user controls the level of detail to be displayed in the search result abstract.
Still other objects and advantages of the invention will in part be obvious and will in part be apparent from the specification.